Julia Bennet's Blog, page 2

Victorian Cookbook: Egg-Hot, a Victorian Pick-me-up.

An egg-hot was supposed to make you feel better on a cold winter’s night. Mrs. Macawber and David Copperfield drink them when David needs comforting, and the ingredients sound spicy and Dickensian. As Victorian as a drink could possibly be.

Mrs. Micawber looking a bit rough. To be fair, it was probably a very hard life.

You will need:

1 bottle of ale/stout
1 egg
1 1/2 tsps butter (Except don’t. Just don’t.)
1 tbsp of sugar
pinch of cinnamon
pinch of nutmeg

Victorian recipes for this drink...

Victorian Cookbook: Mrs. Beeton’s “Very Good” Seed Cake

Jane Eyre

I only know that seed cake exists because of regency romance. Heroines are always eating it at breakfast time. Apparently, it also pops up in Jane Eyre when Miss Temple gives some to Jane and Helen Burns as a treat. I’d totally forgotten this detail, though.

I used a scaled down version of Mrs. Beeton’s recipe but, for fun, here’s the original:

Ingredients for a very good seed cake:

1 lb of butter, 6 eggs, 3/4 lb of sifted sugar, pounded mace to taste, Grated nutmeg to tas...

Victorian Cookbook: Syllabub

I thought I knew what syllabub was. A cool, creamy dessert usually eaten by historical romance heroines at a ball or rout.

But then I read Mrs. Beeton’s recipe…

Mrs. Beeton, author of “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Houehold Management” (1860)

1 pint sherry or white wine,

1/2 grated nutmeg

Sugar to taste

1 1/2 pints milk

And, confusingly, she then says:

“clouted cream may be held on the top…and a little brandy may be added to the wine before the milk is put in. …Warm milk may be ...

Victorian Cookbook: Curds and Whey

[image error]Little Miss Muffet by Arthur Rackham

Curds and whey seem like a neat step up from Workhouse Gruel. Theyre almost as simple but way more nutritious. You can eat them outdoors while sitting on a tuffet or, if youre the heroine of an historical romance, from your sickbed as a medicinal posset. If youre the hero of said novel, eat them sitting up in bed as you recover from a flesh wound. Dont forget to mutter manfully about sickroom pap while downplaying the severity of your injury.

The recipe I...

Victorian Cookbook: Workhouse Gruel

Welcome to what might be the first in a series of posts on Victorian recipes. I hope most of them will taste nicer than this one for workhouse gruel, but this seemed like a nice simple recipe to begin with.

Ingredients:

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3 dessert spoons of oats

1 pint of water

Salt to taste

Method:

Mix the oatmeal with a little of the water until it looks like the image to the right. I dont know about you, but Im excited.

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Put the rest of the water in a pan and add the oat mixture. Boil for ten...

Evangeline Jones On the Road

With the help of the lovely people at Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours, Evangeline Jones is hitting the road. Virtual tours are, of course, the best kind of tour, especially during a pandemic. Therell be excerpts and reviews galore.

Heres the schedule, which can also be found at the link above:

Monday, April 27
Review at Historical Fiction with Spirit

Tuesday, April 28
Review at SplendeurCaisse
Excerpt at Books in their Natural Habitat

Wednesday, April 29
Feature at Let Them Read Books

...

Available for Pre-order!

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A Duke who exposes charlatans for fun has seven days to expose the biggest fake of all in this enemies to lovers tale.

Ebook version available for pre-order at Amazon: https://bit.ly/RuinOfEvangelineJones

Further purchase links to come.

Cover Reveal

Its here at last! The Ruin of Evangeline Jones has a cover!

Do you enjoy enemies to lovers romances? If the answer is yes, I cant wait for you to meet Evangeline and Alex (though, if youve read The Madness of Miss Grey, youve met Alex already). Hes the Duke of Harcastle now, but his true passion is still uncovering fakes and frauds wherever he finds them. That is, until he meets Evangeline Jones, a charlatan medium, whos determined to resist him.

I hope you love them as much as I do.

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The Ruin of Evangeline Jones

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Yay! I’m pleased to announce that The Ruin of Evangeline Jones is scheduled for release on April 27th 2020. To those of you who have already read The Madness of Miss Grey and have asked me if Alex is getting his own story: This is it!

I don’t have a cover or back cover copy yet, but here’s the blurb I wrote when I was submitting it:

Alex Stanton just inherited a dukedom but his true passion is uncovering charlatans and frauds wherever he finds them. Spiritualist and medium Evangeline “Ev...

Top 10 Film Costumes

Recently, I posted some images of some costumes from Crimson Peak to Facebook. My followers seemed to like them and, well, I certainly liked them, and you know I’m always looking for an excuse to share costume porn here, so I decided to do my own Top 10 costumes from film.

Here are the rules:

Only one costume per film allowed.I had to be able to find good quality images of the costume (which ruled out The Artist and Wings of the Dove).It had to be from a film I enjoyed and would recommend (wh...